Iðunn

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Iðunn is a goddess of Norse mythology whose single defining role is custody of the apples that keep the gods from aging. She belongs to the Æsir, the principal family of Norse gods, and the medieval sources name her as the wife of Bragi, the god associated with poetry.

Almost everything told of her turns on one story, preserved in Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda, in the section on the language of poetry. The giant Þjazi, aided under duress by the trickster Loki, lures Iðunn out of Ásgarð and carries her off, apples and all. Deprived of her fruit, the gods grow old and grey with startling speed — a detail the text states flatly, and which gives the myth its force: the powers of the world are not exempt from time, only protected from it. Threatened with death, Loki borrows the goddess Freyja’s falcon shape, flies to the giant’s hall, turns Iðunn into a nut, and carries her home as Þjazi pursues in eagle form and burns to death at the walls of Ásgarð. Snorri draws the episode in part from an older skaldic poem, Haustlöng, attributed to the ninth- or tenth-century poet Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, which shows the tale already current well before the Christian-era compilation.

Beyond this narrative the figure is sparely attested. She appears in the Eddic poem Lokasenna, where Loki, trading insults with the assembled gods, accuses her of embracing her brother’s killer — a charge whose background is otherwise lost. The fragmentary Hrafnagaldr Óðins gives her a darker, more elusive part, but that poem’s age and authenticity are themselves disputed. The skaldic sources also use her name in poetic circumlocutions, the kennings by which Norse verse names one thing through another.

What the apples mean is partly a matter of reconstruction rather than record. The texts say the gods eat them against old age; they do not call the fruit a source of immortality, and scholarship is cautious about reading later notions of an apple of life back into them. The name Iðunn is usually connected to a root suggesting renewal or rejuvenation, which would fit her function neatly — but the etymology is contested, and the fit may be the interpreter’s as much as the language’s. Whether she was widely worshipped, or chiefly a figure of story and verse, the surviving evidence does not say; no certain cult of her is known.

She survived the conversion of Scandinavia as a literary memory rather than a living devotion, and re-entered modern imagination through the antiquarian revival of Norse myth, where the keeper of the golden apples proved an apt image long after the gods who needed them had ceased to be feared.

→ Related: Bragi